Livin' and Dion: Pork, jelly doughnuts and a place to get away from politics

Wednesday

Oct 4, 2017 at 3:02 PMOct 4, 2017 at 3:08 PM

Marc Munroe Dion Herald News Staff Reporter

I usually don’t tell people how much I love grocery stores. I like to eat, of course, but more than that, I find grocery stores to be very hopeful places.

Grocery stores are clean, and brightly-lit. The packages of food are colorful, and there’s always the chance I’ll find some new product, some food I haven’t eaten before, or at least some new variety of Pop Tarts. I love Pop Tarts.

If I go into the grocery store for something simple, say one can of chili, I have to go up and down every aisle, just to look at the food, just in case there’s something I don’t even know I want yet.

Very few things cheer me up the way a grocery store does, and I’ll sometimes go to a grocery store just to feel cheerful, to fight back some small sadness in my life.

That said, I remained pretty calm when it was announced that a new Market Basket would locate in Fall River.

That surprised me, too. Maybe I didn’t think it was really going to happen. Even worse, maybe I’m losing my childlike love of food stores. That would be awful because, at 60 years of age, with 35 of those years spent in newsrooms, about all I’ve got left of childlike love is grocery stores and Christmas.

I’ve been dipped in Fall River’s “everything is bad” culture, and so, God help me, I’ve been heard to say, “Just once I’d like to live somewhere prosperous enough that a grocery store opening isn’t the biggest news of the year.”

I’m sorry. That’s not something I should have said. It’s the kind of thing you say if you’re one of those dreary people who enjoys ruining everything for everybody because it makes them feel smart.

Anyway, I got over my Market Basket indifference when my wife, fellow reporter Deborah Allard, took a press tour of the new store, which opens this weekend.

She told me it’s a big store , that there was a big cold case that will be devoted solely to pork, and that a manager told her their jelly doughnuts are “stuffed with jelly.”

Stuffed with jelly. Is there a more beautiful phrase? If there is, it’s probably the phrase, “devoted solely to pork.”

If you’re newspaper columnist, they pay you to get mad. If there’s anything easy about my job, it’s that it’s not too hard to get mad in Fall River. It’s an angry place, and with good reason.

But anger, like politics, is corrosive to the soul. If you’re not careful, you’ll be angry all the time.

If you’re not even more careful, you’ll become one of those unpleasant people who can’t think of anything BUT politics, the kind of person who gets up every morning and eats a big bowl of rumor or, worse yet, gets up every morning and starts a rumor. After that, it’s a VERY short trip to becoming kind of a municipal joke.

As soon as I heard “stuffed with jelly,” I developed an intense interest in the new Market Basket. I like jelly doughnuts.

This is good. It re-focuses me on a childlike joy, and de-focuses me on the issue of which city official is calling which other city official a liar. In addition, the possibility of pork and jelly doughnuts lets me look away from the local election, an election in which even the promises are stale.

In a world run by brats, it’s a good idea to experience childlike joy as often as you can.

It’ll be Christmas soon, and Market Basket is about to open. I have to keep writing if I want to get paid, but, in my personal life, I’m going to try and focus on elves and jelly doughnuts instead of Fall River politics.

Of course, Fall River politics is largely made up of mythical creatures and doughnuts, so maybe it won’t help at all.

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